It’s my liefie's birthday soon!

Liefie (Afrikaans):  love. That is what it is supposed to mean according to ‘JJ’. I hope he’s not feeding me bullshit and it means something completely different or dirty! lol..

Anyway, it’s his birthday soon, on Monday!! I know this post comes a bit early, but to be honest, I have so many things to do in the meantime, that I fear I might miss the chance to post on my blog how much I love him and wish him happy birthday!

On Table Mountain in Cape Town

You see, we’re flying really early on Tuesday morning to Greece. So, we don’t have lots of things planned for Monday to celebrate. I’ll be at work till the afternoon and we’ll just meet some friends for dinner in the evening. Going to Greece for a couple of weeks is a nice way to celebrate anyway, no? Bear in mind that while he was growing up in the South Hemisphere, his birthday was in the middle of the cold winter and I think during school break. So, this will be a nice change. I’ll try to find something nice to do there as well.

It’s not that bad for him anyway. Last year we celebrated his birthday in Sardinia and the year before I organised a catamaran day cruise around Santorini. I can’t really remember what we did the year before, but I think it was as nice. No, no. I’m not complaining. My birthdays have been as nice.

In Torquay last year

As I was saying, we’re flying on Tuesday morning, Monday we have the dinner and during the weekend we have pintar rapido. I think I might have mentioned it before. It’s a Spanish art movement as far as I know. Artists will visit the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea on Saturday and paint something from the area. They’re supposed to start and finish that day, in a specific time period. Then, on Sunday there will be an exhibition of the works, an award ceremony and then an auction of the rest of the pieces. The weather is supposed to be very good, so I hope it will be a nice day out for us. JJ will be painting and I will be there helping (or reading my book or working on my tan).

So, Happy Birthday my liefie! I hope you have a great day / week / month / year! I love you so much. I'm so happy I have you in my life.

Random questions and thoughts of the day

1. I was more affected from the shutdown of the Google Reader than I expected. In the past, I had my igoogle home page with my unread blog posts and a Google Reader app on my phone. The app died already and the igoogle home page will soon follow. It doesn't work for the blog posts already anyway. So, I need to come up with an alternative. 

What do you guys use? For the time being I’m checking ‘Feedly’. Since I didn't register to it before the downfall of Google Reader, I wasn't able to automatically link accounts. So, I had to manually enter urls to set it up. It’s not that difficult, only time consuming. Unfortunately, for some weird reasons, it doesn't like Erik. I’m not sure if he’s done something to them or not, but his website is not apparently a website... Go figure…     

 

Closed for business 

2. During last Saturday’s bbq, I had a discussion with my housemate concerning music and movies. She mentioned that there are no more famous songs that are also from a movie. For example Celine Dion’s Titanic song was a huge success in the charts (even if I never liked it). However, recently, like in the last 5 years, there is no successful original song that is linked to a successful movie. When she mentioned that, I had to prove her wrong (for the argument’s sake), but I couldn’t. Maybe, it was the overload of pork chops, the heat or the alcohol, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember a song from a recent movie... Can you?

Who doesn't know this song?

OK, these were my two questions of the day. I can now change the subject.

3.I’m counting down to a week till my summer holidays. I know I was in Greece for my brother's wedding just two weeks ago, but that doesn't mean that I’m not looking forward to it. I’m taking ‘JJ’ to almost 3 weeks of resting, enjoying the sun, the sea and everything else the islands we’ll be visiting can offer. Last time we were on big holidays, we went to South Africa. Our vacations there were truly amazing as you can read here, but they were a bit tiring as well. There were so many places to visit and things to do. JJ was driving so much. So, this time we’ll do the opposite, just rest.
We’ll be visiting first the island called Paros and then Mykonos. Both islands are quite popular with the latter being quite popular specially with the gay community. I've been to Paros for holidays many years ago and to Mykonos for only one afternoon while island hopping also more than a decade ago. It will be nice to see them both again.

That beauty was created with marble from Paros

Before and after sweating

Coming back from my last week holidays has been interesting. The first couple of days I was simply exhausted. My tiredness was catching up. The first couple of nights after I came back, I was fast asleep almost around 9:30pm. 

I'm now getting back into normal and I'm also trying to catch up with my fitness regime. So, today, after work I decided to do a 10 kilometers (6.2 mi) run. It went quite well considering the almost 2 weeks gap. 

Getting ready after work. You can see Big Ben and the London eye in the background 

A bit after an hour later, you can see the Clapham Common in the background

The route I followed. Running next to River Thames and through Battersea Park and Clapham Common is always very pleasant.

I was wearing my Cancer Research UK t-shirt, just to raise awareness. :-)